Political Science Research Questions

It carries its case. "Drawing on the case study of Matamoros, Mexico, how did the implementation of MPP and Title 42 impact asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border?" names the city, the two policies and the group affected, so a reader knows what is in scope before going any further. That naming does the work a sampling frame does in other fields, and without it you have a topic about governance rather than a defensible limit on what you would have to read. Then put a period on it: a closed window, 1990 to 2015 say, is what makes a claim checkable.

Yes, when the theory is your data. "What is the role of the state, according to classical liberal state theory?" works because of the according to clause: it names the body of thought being read, so the answer comes out of those texts the way another study's answer comes out of interviews. Bolted onto an empirical study, the same sentence is a literature review section wearing a question mark. The test is whether someone could disagree with your answer by reading the same texts.

Yes, and it sits mostly in public administration and political behavior: service delivery in a named municipality, adoption of e-government, engagement on a platform among first-time voters. Two wording habits keep it defensible. Relate to promises an association and nothing more, which is the right promise when your evidence is a survey rather than an experiment. And keep the claim where the data actually is: asking whether quasi-judicial officers perceive themselves as having the same control as judges is not the same as asking whether they have it.

Say what it's a case of. Case selection is a research design decision, and the reasons that hold up are the ones a theory recognizes: the case is typical of a class, it's the hardest test your claim could face, it's deviant, or it matches another case on everything except the one thing you care about. Speaking the language or coming from there won't carry the justification on its own, though both are real advantages worth naming once the analytical reason is on the page.

Sometimes, and far more often one rung down from where you first aimed. Civil servants, commission staff, party organizers and NGO officers answer more often than ministers do, and they usually know more about how a policy was actually implemented. Design the study so it still works at the number you can realistically get, and keep a documentary fallback, because a thesis that needs twelve elite interviews and lands three is in trouble.

Put an end date in the question and hold to it. Coverage of Gaza between October 2023 and October 2025, Twitter use in Zimbabwe from 2015 to 2020: a stated window keeps the corpus you promised the same size as the one you actually read. Anything after the cut-off belongs in a short note in the conclusion, not in the analysis. If the case moves while you're writing, resist widening the window, because every extra month is more material and no more argument.

No. Commission reports, parliamentary records and party communications are primary sources in this field, and press coverage is primary for studying the coverage itself rather than the events behind it. A thesis built on documents is standard rather than a fallback. What you owe is the rigor an interview study owes: which documents, over what period, from which sources, and why those and not others. If your program requires fieldwork, that's a program rule to check with your department early, not a disciplinary standard.

Your argument can be normative. Your evidence has to be handled the same way whichever side it favors. Openly critical work on state capture or on the privatization of public housing holds up when the reasoning is visible and the counter-evidence gets answered rather than skipped. The failure is selecting only the sources that agree with you and calling that a corpus. State your position in the methods chapter and let the reader check each step for themselves.